ESCAPIST READS
New and upcoming mysteries and thrillers
THE BRAMBLE AND THE ROSE: A HENRY FARRELL NOVEL TOM BOUMAN WW Norton & Co Inc
EDGAR winner Bouman’s third Henry Farrell mystery has the small-town cop in the Endless Mountains of north-eastern Pennsylvania perplexed by the headless body of a man partly eaten by a bear.
The hideous remains are soon identified as those of a retired PI, and the forensics point to murder. Anxious and prone to depression, Farrell also grapples with threats to his new marriage and an unhappy teenage nephew gone missing. Bouman is as exacting in his descriptions of the Pennsylvania wilderness as he is of its down-on-their-luck inhabitants. It’s as if Henry David Thoreau had lived in the age of pick-up trucks, survivalists and fentanyl.
CAMINO WINDS JOHN GRISHAM Hodder & Stoughton
JOHN Grisham’s amiable jape of a “beach book” – the publisher’s term – is a follow-up to (2017). In that one, rare book dealer Bruce Cable stole F Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts from a library and got away with it.
In the new one, the “roguish though lovable character” helps solve the murder of a thriller writer on an island off the Florida coast.
The whole thing reads as if the Hardy Boys were in their late 40s and had developed a taste for shrimp tacos and exquisite wines. (Available later this month.)
CITY OF MARGINS WILLIAM BOYLE Pegasus Books
IN HIS fourth novel since his stunning debut, Gravesend, the grandly talented Boyle is still in the Brooklyn neighbourhood where he grew up.
He knows the music of the Italian American voices, from punk to bar stool to operatic, like nobody else: Mob goons, college dropouts, melancholy widows and pink-haired rockers mix it up in this deliciously convoluted tale that reads like a fresh new season of The Sopranos.
DEAD LAND SARA PARETSKY Hodder & Stoughton
SARA Paretsky’s gloriously kick-ass private eye, V.I. “Vic” Warshawski, is back for the 20th time in a political-rot thriller that’s the definition of perfection in the genre.
Vic is feeling her (unspecified) age in this one – creaky and “mildewed”
– but that barely slows her down in her search for a missing singer-songwriter who’d been living under a Chicago railroad viaduct.
The novel’s robustly flavoursome cast of characters includes a semi-deranged land preservationist, a corrupt Nobel Prize winner, a Chilean Ayn Rand disciple and several wonderful dogs.